Update

The property manager called me today and said he'd let me out of my lease, so that's half the battle (OK, more like an eighth of the battle). Also, I just e-mailed him a random question (at 10:30 at night) and he got right back to me. I reserve the right to rescind this judgment if they pull one over on me in the end, but I heart my management company ... it's too bad most of their properties are in upper manhattan (if you ever want to move in that direction, let me know and I'll hook you up. It's not all as scary as central harlem has been of late.)

So for now I'm Craigslisting it in Hoboken ... I sent out 7 replies tonight. Wish me luck.

Oh, and yes, you are going to hear all the details of my apartment search. Because, unless you live here or are my mother, you just don't understand. But as a wise apartment broker once said, it is what it is.

Places I've Been: Yum Yum Bangkok

Welcome to the latest sporadic feature of Hoty Takes Manhattan: Places I've Been, in which I chronicle clubs, restaurants and such. This is just as much for my benefit as for yours, since there are so many amazing places in the city it's easy to forget where they are.

Yum Yum Bangkok, on 9th Ave. at 46th St. (Midtown/Hell's Kitchen), is actually three restaurants built next to one another, called Yum Yum Bangkok 1, 2 and 3. Which makes it pretty damn confusing if you're trying to meet someone at one of them. (I've been to 1 and 3.) They serve the same food, though I think they all have separate kitchens. I paid $8.95 for pad thai there; you can order a massive prix fixe meal for $15.95. Rumor has it they have good Thai tea there. And Thai beer, naturally.

Restaurant-wise, you can't go wrong in Hell's Kitchen. Just start at 42nd street and walk uptown until you find something to your liking.


Oh, and by the way, there were four other unrelated shootings in Harlem Monday night — one guy was shot three times allegedly because he bumped into someone on the sidewalk. Oh, and the Marcus Garvey Park shooters are still at large. So yeah, I'm getting the hell out of here, that's not a question. But man, it's going to be a pain. An expensive pain. This is a lot of shit to deal with all by myself.

Harlem is Burning ...

Well not quite. But eight people, most of them teenagers, got shot a few blocks from here Monday night, just a few minutes before I got off the train from work. Which is a sign, I think, that it's time for me to move the hell out of this neighborhood.

What to do next I'm not sure. Hoboken is right across the river in jersey, it's a little cheaper and it's adorable so I'm looking into moving there. Though I'd gladly move to the upper west side or of course to the east village if I could afford it. I would really like to live with someone else but subletting is going to be hard because I'm kind of a prisoner of my furniture. So if any New Yorkers/Jerseyites are reading this and looking for a fun, responsible roommate with a full apartment's worth of furniture, give a girl a holler.

memorial memories

Happy belated memorial day everyone! I hope you all took a moment to honor the sacrifices of our brave men and women in uniform, and another second to honor those of our high school band geeks in wool uniforms, providing you with painstakingly memorized and endlessly practiced patriotic entertainment while sweating profusely and praying that the good Lord will have mercy on them by allowing them to lose consciousness. Those were the days!

My big Memorial Day adventure was that they stopped the train before I went to work because there was an accident so I had to take the bus (AGGRAVATING) to another train and was 20 minutes late for work. The joy (if you can call it that) of living in New York though is that it happens to everyone occasionally so the boss was pretty chill about it.

Memorial Day weekend also means that, give or take a few days, it was a year ago that the other interns and I got dumped off at Penn Station. Ah, DJNF boot camp. If you want some idea of what boot camp was like, they have a blog this year. I think I spent most of my first weekend in New York sleeping. It was pretty amazing. Speaking of which, I think it's time for me to go to bed.

Edit, 2:44 a.m.: I just heard the garbage man outside the building. As he was throwing the bags onto the truck he yelled, "Best smell in the world! WOO!"

OK, I'm really going to bed now.

Dear Hillary Clinton, Please Stop

Every time Hillary Clinton says something mind-bogglingly offensive, vindictive and wrong, I think there's no way she could possibly top it. But then somehow she does.

But I don't know how it's possible to get any worse than what she said a few days ago, which was basically that she should stay in the race because, hey, Barack Obama might get assassinated. Mind you, Obama has gotten death threats and already has his own Secret Service detail.

At this point, I doubt there is much more damage Hillary can do to the party since she's clearly flipped out (well, maybe there is, I'm surprised it has gotten this bad in the first place). But according to Slate's Hillary Deathwatch (For the candidate who has NOT faced death threats and does NOT need her own Secret Service detail), the mathematical chances of her winning stand at about 0.7 percent. So Hillary, for your own future political good, please do yourself a favor, cut your losses and get out of this race.

I could go on, but Keith Olbermann says it all (literally, he does — this clip goes on for about 9 minutes.)

The Newspaper Industry is Fucked

See the job losses in map form!

Paradox: Some of these places are still hiring even as they're firing all their veteran staffers. Ah, cheap labor.

Goodbye, Student Ghetto!

Watching the movers carry all my stuff out of my college house four months ago was one thing, but now that our lease is up and the people who have been my surrogate family for the last five years are all moving on, it's definitely the end of an era.

Three years we've lived in that same house. So many memories. Domestic disasters and critter infestations and endless piles of dishes and late-night pizza ordering and pancakes and a few parties and occasional catty drama, birthdays and homecomings and halloweens, a peeping tom, a horrifically failed attempt at wop, and even one time a random guy passed out on our porch.

It's been a damn good run. And as my roomies and I sat in our empty living room last weekend delaying the inevitable cleaning I couldn't imagine having spent it living with anyone anywhere else.

When life gives you lemons, paint that shit gold

Here's a fun time-waster, as a promo for atmosphere's new album, which I recommend.

On an unrelated note, I would just like to say that I hate Times Square with a burning passion. Well, not so much Times Square, but the tourists. Not so much the tourists in and of themselves, but cram a hundred thousand of them together within a few blocks and they all adopt this hive mentality that sucks out all of their common sense. You know, that part of your brain that tells you not to stand in the middle of the sidewalk when you choose to stand and gawk at something or not to stop and take pictures IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BLOODY ROAD. And the part that acknowledges the guys who try to sell you comedy tickets, therefore encouraging them.

Political Ringtones!

So you just can't get enough soundbites of the presidential candidates? Do you light up every time you hear Hillary Clinton laugh? Get giddy when John McCain berates his questioners? Well now, courtesy of Slate, you can download some of your favorite snippets as ringtones. And it's free, apparently. They don't support Verizon or I'd be all over that, purely out of morbid curiosity.

Shirley Manson gets C-listed by Times health section

From the artcle "The Growing Wave of Teenage Self-Injury":

Celebrities, too, have contributed to its higher profile. Among those who have confessed to being self-injurers are the late Princess Diana, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Richie, Richie Edwards, Courtney Love and the lead singer on the Garbage band album “Bleed Like Me.”

Interesting.
Also, who is Richie Edwards?

I heart Jay Smooth

"A politician is just like a plumber. When you need someone to take care of your plumbing, you get a plumber. When you need someone to take care of politics, you get a politician. Both do a service that we really need them to do, but if you watch too closely when they do their jobs, you get grossed out, because they have greasy, dirty jobs. ... We do need to be real about what this job is and remember that we're not hiring a saint. We're hiring the nation's new plumber." —Jay Smooth

I know I've linked to him before, but seriously, Jay Smooth is my hero. Brilliantly snarky people are a dime a dozen, but precious few are those who can be brilliantly snarky in such an un-hostile way. He almost makes me want to take up video blogging. Almost.

Edit: whenever I take random multi-week-long hiatuses (hiati?) from this blog, keep this in mind.

Famous people at my work!

Today Governor Paterson was in the lobby of the Times building, so some co-workers and I went down to gawk and take cell phone pictures. He was surrounded by a bunch of reporters, quietly answering questions, and like most famous people (such as Russ Feingold), he is much shorter than you'd expect seeing him on TV. As a co-worker pointed out, you wouldn't think the governor of New York would be a short, quiet guy.

Image stolen shamelessly from my co-worker kenneth, a much more adept cell phone photog than I am.

I heart playlist.com

I really don't feel like sleeping right now. What I *do* feel like is listening to random songs ... and with Project Playlist I don't even have to download them, because it links to streaming music on other sites. The downside: the links go bad and cease to work if whoever's hosting them decides to take the song down. But a small price to pay. Try it if you're bored, it's pretty much amazing.